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IlyaShpitser comments on Modest Superintelligences - Less Wrong
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Where do you get your numbers from? Why aren't [big number] of educated people a superintelligence now? If it's due to coordination problems, then you are sweeping the complexity of solving such problems under the rug.
Let's think of examples of groups of ten thousand genius-level people working together towards a common narowly-defined goal.
Wikipedia claims that the LHC “was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories”. I doubt they were all von Neumann level, and I imagine most of them weren’t working exclusively on the LCH. And no matter how nice scientists and engineers are, the group probably didn’t cooperate as well the one Wei proposed. (Although diversity probably does count for something.)
Other groups of similar size I can think of are NASA, IBM, Google and Microsoft. (Though, like the LHC, I don’t think they’re hiring only von Neumann level geniuses. Probably many multinational companies would exceed the size but would be even further from the genius requirements.) But they don’t quite work in a single direction (NASA has many missions, Google and Microsoft have many products).
That said, I wouldn’t object strongly to calling such groups weakly superintelligent. Building stuff like the LHC or the Apollo program in ten years is so vastly beyond the ability of a single man that I don’t quite classify an entity that can do it as a “human-level intelligence”, even though it is assembled from humans.
(Also, I could see a group like this building an MSI-2, though it’d take more than ten years if starting now.)
The "Working in a single direction" part seems hard: are you so single-minded? I know I'm not.
No, I’m not, but I’m not nearly von Neumann’s genius level either, and I wasn’t educated and indoctrinated from birth for that purpose.
And there certainly are people who are that single-minded, we’ll “just” have to figure out which parts of nature or nurture cause it. Even drugs slightly more advanced that the stuff used now for ADHD might be useful.
Even with “normal” geniuses, I’d bet a group would gain a lot of focus even from “mundane” changes like not having to worry about office politics, finding grants, or assembling your children’s college fund, or going to college and finding a promising career for younger geniuses. I’m not saying this kind of changes are easier to achieve in practice, just that they’re very low-tech; you don’t need lots of research to try them, just a big (monetary and political) budget.
All these can be viewed as wasting time, but don't forget that they are important parts of the motivation framework -- promotion, recognition, monetary reward, etc -- that people operate in. Motivation is an important factor in productivity. If we remove (eg) the competitive grant system, will researchers slack off?
I’ll bet some would and some wouldn’t. See Einstein and how he was working on relativity (at least at the beginning).
If this trait is genetically detectable, it would presumably be a selection criteria for MSI-1. If it is based on nurture, presumably the necessary conditions would be part of the indoctrination for MSI-1. Finally, if it cannot be anticipated, presumably MSI-1 would use post-facto selection (i.e., raise and train more than 10k candidates, keep those that “work” and let the others do other stuff.)
Also, there are likely other motivational elements that would work in a MSI-1 (at least in my view, the selection and training and indoctrination implicit in the OP’s suggestion would be very different from any group I am aware of in history). And stuff like peer recognition and the satisfaction of a job well done are huge motivators in some cultures.
Also, remember we’re seeing this with culture-tinted glasses: In the west pretty much everyone is focused on a carreer, family and the like; the few who aren’t are seen as “slackers”, “hippies”, “weirdos” etc. Even if not subscribing to that cultural subtext rationally, it’s hard to prevent the unconscious associations of “no care for money=status” => “no motivation”.
Moreover, and this was part of my idea, I think there may be something to the idea behind structured procrastination (.com). Which is to say I don't really know. What I do know is that I'm not very single-minded and there is evidence it is not a common trait.
Part of the reason is due to coordination problems, which I think would be reduced if the group consisted of clones of a single person with similar education and upbringing, and hence similar values/goals.
Another part of the reason is that we simply don't have that many von Neumanns today. The [big number] of educated people that you see in the world consist almost entirely of people who are much less intelligent compared to von Neumann.
Not only are there more people today than in von Neumann's time, but it is far easier to be discovered or to educate yourself. The general prosperity level of the world is also far higher. As a result, I expect, purely on statistical grounds, that there would be far more von Neumann level people today than in von Neumann's time. I certainly don't see a shortage of brilliant people in academia, for instance.
What is a test for a von Neumann level intelligence? Do you think "top people" in technical fields today would fail?
My intuition says that if we took the 10000 most intelligent people in the world, put them together and told them to work on some technical project, that would be much less effective than if we could make 10000 copies of the most intelligent person, in part because the 10000th most intelligent person is much less productive than the 1st. As evidence for this, I note that there are very few people whose "known for" list on Wikipedia is nearly as long as von Neumann's, and you'd expect more such people if the productivity difference between the 1st and the 10000th weren't very large.
But if it turns out that I'm wrong, and it's not worth doing the cloning step, then I'd be happy with a "MSI-0.9" that just gathers 10000 top people and sets them to work on MSI-2 (or whatever technologies appears most important to getting a positive Singularity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler
"Mathematical historian Eric Temple Bell estimated that, had Gauss published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years"; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_things_named_after_mathematicians
(This isn't to contradict your point, just provide relevant evidence.)
I agree that von Neumann was exceptional.
I am not sure a Wikipedia rap sheet is as good a proxy for genius as you claim. I think genius is necessary but not sufficient. I also think "recreating von Neumann" will require context not present in his DNA. There are also issues with parallelizing intellectual work detailed in "the mythical man month," I am sure you are aware of.
At any rate, instead of trying for MSI-1, which has huge technical obstacles to overcome, why not simply push to acquire financial resources and hire brilliant people to do the work you think is necessary. That is doable with today's tech, and today's people.
[comment from the heart, rather than from the head: your description of MSI-1 sounds kind of, well, totalitarian. Don't you think that's a little peculiar?]
The point is to obtain an insurmountable lead on WBE tech, otherwise you'll just spur competition and probably end up with Robin Hanson's Malthusian scenario. (If intelligence explosion were possible, you could win the WBE race by a small margin and translate that into a big win, but for this post I'm assuming that intelligence explosion isn't possible, so you need to win the race by a large margin.)
In that case you're in for a surprise when you find out what I was referring to by "WBE-enabled institutional controls" for MSI-2. Read Carl Shulman's Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms.
Since exploiting intelligence explosion still requires FAI, and FAI could be very difficult, you might still need a large enough margin to perform all the necessary FAI research before your competition stumbles on an AGI.
I thought of an interesting objection to this. What if the cloned agents decided that the gap between themselves and other humans was sufficiently well-defined for them to implement the coherent extrapolated volition of the clones themselves only?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/932/stupid_questions_open_thread/64r4
Of course, this problem could potentially arise even if the gap was poorly defined...
That isn't necessarily an objection. Personally, I'm unsure if I would prefer human-CEV to Johnny-CEV.
Agreed. I don't know much about von Neumann, but I would trust Feynman with my CEV any day.
They are. Many collections of individuals (e.g. tech companies, hedge funds, PACs, etc.) seem to do rather a lot more than an individual human could. Likewise, humanity as a whole could be classified as a superintelligence (and possibly a recursively self-improving one: see the Flynn effect). The idea is not that large numbers of intelligent people aren't a superintelligence, it's that 10000 von Neumanns would be a more powerful superintelligence than most groups of highly intelligent people.
Downvoted for using terms imprecisely; see The Virtue of Narrowness.
Superintelligences are not "any powerful entity"; humanity is not "recursively self-improving". This conversation was over some time in 2009 when Eliezer finally got Tim Tyler to stop applying those terms to things that already exist, as though that meant anything.
Insofar as I have seen it defined here, an intelligence is that which produces optimization given a certain amount of resources, and higher intelligences exert more optimization power that lower intelligence given the same starting conditions. Since many organizations, especially tech companies, do rather a lot of optimizing given their resources. Apple, a company of 60000 employees, made profits of 30 billion last year. Apple, effectively a profit maximizer, is doing rather more than 60000 independent individuals would (they're making $500000/employee/year in profits). Considering that they are doing a lot of optimization given their starting conditions, I would say that they are at least a weakly superhuman intelligence.
Humanity is working to improve its own intelligence, and succeeding. So we have the "self-improving" right there. As we get smarter/more able, we are finding new and interesting ways to improve. Hence, "recursively". Evidently, "self improving in such a way that the entity can find new ways to self improve" isn't "recursive self improvement". I really don't know what the term would mean, and would appreciate if someone would enlighten me.
It is possible for the Wise Master to be mistaken, you know. He doesn't articulate in that article his reasons for drawing lines where he does, he just says "don't get me started". That makes it not a great article to cite in support of those lines, since it means you are basically just appealing to his authority, rather than referencing his arguments.